Japan’s Prisons Are a Haven for Elderly Women
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
There is no commute, no worrying about what to eat, what to wear, picking up kids, or anything else that consumes a normal person's time. In a way it is kind of like a vacation. You have so much disposable time to spend on hobbies, exercise, or education.
It is very much like being in prison, except that I am not afraid of my fellow inmates. It is strange though, because you don't get to pick your friends, much like prison. I suspect the fellow fobbits are substantially more educated on average than a typical prison population and probably generally healthier physically and mentally. You would be surprised, though, at just how mentally unhealthy many of your coworkers are when you are around them long enough to really see it.
Unless you are extremely ambitious and psychotically disciplined that much downtime grates on your soul. Being deployed for too long can be depressing and you cannot escape a certain amount of emotional isolation. It is also weird having a spouse and children and yet living apart for a year or more like a single person.
The long term consequence of the environment is an unhealthy dose of apathy. If you are too bored for too long you really don't care about most anything. Unfortunately, the environment provides little motivation to care as you are less likely to die in a combat zone stuck on a fob than driving to work in the civilian world.
I don't know - our fellow FOB inmates (Afghan security forces) kept turning on us and shooting people.
Even with these insider threats and the periodic rocket attacks daily life was still hopelessly dull. I remember people willing to cut off their arms to experience the misery of combat just to get off the FOB.
What does FOB mean to you people? In the UK military a FOB is a little base with maybe twenty to a hundred people in, planted in an area surrounded by the enemy, designed for you to patrol out from it and dominate the ground. Sleepy wasn't how I'd describe it. Sleep-less more like. I worked 16 hour days for seven months and dealt with people being killed and maimed daily.
If you are talking about unhealthy enough to create injurious situations I think that differs by the situation and stimulus present. I don't think there is a single uniform answer. Also, it really helps if there are people around to watch for dramatic shifts in behavior before it becomes self-destructive.
It is important to note that many people may silently suffer from exceedingly minor and undiagnosed mental health defects that they may not be aware of. When you are around people long enough these qualities become more observable. In my experience it takes as little as 2 to 3 months of observation to really identify it with some amount of fine precision and learn to your own communication skills to compensate for the identified personality qualities.
I have a professional mental health counselor in my family who insists as much as 40% of the population could benefit from some minor amount of behavior altering medication. I haven't observed numbers that high from deployment environments, but I have observed a higher number of individuals fitting this criteria than you might think.
lol, that's what the pharmaceutical companies want us to believe. a lot of those medicines are based on inconclusive research and wrong assumptions. unless you're taking antipsychotics, stimulants, benzos, or a few other families of drugs, your crazy pills are probably based on bunk science.
We had an interesting problem develop where people were going to the medic tent and getting prescribed Ambien for sleep, but then they would stay up after taking it. It makes you feel really drunk, and it was the only escape from the drudgery. This substance abuse may have ironically saved our sanity.
Tallil, Iraq, 2008
I refined my programming skills developing a personal open source software tool over two deployments. Two deployments was almost enough to transform me from a junior developer into a strong senior. I also passed the CISSP exam on the first try because I had time to read the entire course book and think about the qualifying management scenarios.
You absolutely have to find a way to say busy. Boredom reinforces your loneliness and lack of emotional intimacy, which is a bad place to be in.
I am not alleging anything on any particular nation, but coming from a developing country where its own internally deployed troops known to commit a lot of sexual violence, I am curious about the underlying causes. And if there is a way through which civilian governments can control it.
I am really not the expert to provide a qualified answer to any of this. I can only speak to my own observations. My perspective is that of a US Army soldier. Everything that follows is only my personal opinion.
I have been deployed three times and only one of those times was sexual assault a significant concern. When a certain NATO ally left the area the problem essentially evaporated overnight. That change happened shortly after we arrived at the area. I am unaware of what that the motivating factor was.
Coincidentally, shortly before that NATO ally left (days before I arrived) there was also a notable incident. A seemingly unarmed victim was attacked at night by two people in civilian clothes. One of these people served as a distraction while the second clubbed the victim in the head from behind and then drug the victim to a nearby area that muffled sound. Shortly after that the victim regained consciousness and pulled out a very small knife hidden on their person. The victim was able to carve up one of the assailants legs leaving the second assailant to pull him to safety. The victim then walked to the hospital to be treated for the head injury and there reported the offense. I have no idea if this defensive action contributed to the immediate decline in following sexual assault incidents.
According to the documentary "The Invisible War" the US military forces have had a problem with sexual assault much higher than the comparative civilian world. The documentary does not directly or officially indicate a cause, but to me it looked like the documentary spelled out a specific cause: weak leadership. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invisible_War
> And if there is a way through which civilian governments can control it.
Never tolerate or condone sexual assault in any form. Always investigate reported incidents. Also, and this is important, punish people who are proven to be aware of incidents but fail to report them.
The people who went crazy the fastest were those without "real jobs" (i.e. where contractors did the work and they were still in the force structure but essentially used for undifferentiated tasks). For doctors in (busy) hospitals, aviators, etc., it wasn't as bad.
And then, on a later topside tour, I was standing 3-section watches and then one of the other guys transferred so we went to 2-section watches (port and starboard) while I trained the new guy. The problem was that the new guy was also my roommate on the ship. So we'd stand watch for 6 hours together, go eat together, go back to the stateroom and sleep at the same time (in bunk beds, of course), wake up, eat, go back on watch together. Except for bathroom breaks, we literally spent 24 hours a day together. It only took 3 or so days of that before we were both begging for the sweet release of death...
I was on a submarine and what you've described was what I experienced as well. Add not seeing the sun for 90 days and you've got sub life nailed down. 18hr days, 6 on watch, 6 off watch doing maintenance/training, 6 in the rack...rinse and repeat for the entire deployment...you kinda just fall into a routine after the 1st week or so that causes some distance between what is going on inside the sub to what is happening in the real world...very strange looking back on it now
I think this is a core human drive and it makes me wonder why so many organizations seem to be fundamentally incapable of leveraging their employees' desire to do good work, regardless of the task.
You know the article has a clear agenda when they use fancy graphcs showing the increase of 60 years old crime without showing in comparison the increase of 60 years old in general population in the same time frame. Which would make sense, you know, because we are all aware Japan is aging fast.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aging_of_Japan#/media/File:Jap...
Actually hardly any difference in ratio.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dement...
And I gotta say, while I once scoffed at the idea of robots helping out at home and giving some sense of company, it seems that such things actually might help in this case.
My colleague was recently in a car accident and is now wheelchair-bound. I can tell sometimes that when I’m helping, he feels conflicted in that he doesn’t want to appear helpless and pitiful, but at the same time needs help doing some things. Having a handy robot helper would be an enormous emotional relief for him and would give him the sort of empowerment he really needs.
PS: Japan also has a rather high population density. The shrinking population is likely to end up as a good thing.
PPS: The 200% debt to GDP ratio is rather fictitious as 40% of that is owned bey the Japanease government dropping their actual debt load closer to 120%.
you make it sound like a debt at 120% is nothing or not even a problem.
PS: Remember deflation is a very real issue. Fighting that by buying government bonds seems to be the most ethical way to distribute free money.
Now, if you are thinking in terms of multi generational effects. I can see plenty of moral hazard from doing this, but if you want 2% inflation you need to keep creating new money.
Birth rates in the US are plummeting. They peaked in 2008 at 2.1/woman(the replacement rate) and are now down to 1.7.
I can only offer anecdotes but I know several people of prime child rearing age who don't have families. From my discussions with them, they don't feel secure financially. Maybe people raised in a middle class environment aren't willing to risk poverty to have kids?
Or maybe it's the endless distraction we have available to us. Or maybe it's the increasing isolation of modern life. If you weren't raised in a coherent household maybe you feel less of a need to create one yourself.
One of my coworkers was so desperate when she hit her late 30s that she stopped taking birth control and had unprotected sex with any guy that was willing until she got pregnant. Whoever the guy was, he has no idea he fathered a child. She just wanted him for his sperm. The kid is basically being raised by child care centers while she continues on her career path. The other female coworkers think she is smart and are planning on doing the same thing if they find themselves in a similar situation when they reach their late 30s.
That's just unethical. I feel sorry for the child already...
Sleeping with some person doesn't tell you anything about, say, their family medical history. Sperm banks check that stuff.
However, the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that it is a lot easier for a guy to seriously say, "I want kids," then it is for a woman to seriously say, "I want kids." Being a sperm donor is a heck of a lot easier than actually going through the pregnancy. Even after the kid is born, in a lot of places, including where I live, the majority of the child-rearing responsibilities fall on the woman by default.
Have you seen the price of housing lately?
Have you seen the lack of /careers/ that used to make living in a house for along time a viable idea?
One idea that might work is to give up on trying to get young people to use birth control. Everyone has a number of kids in their late teens/early 20s. Child-rearing would fall to the ((great) grand)parents, who are more financially/socially stable and potentially retired. This has a number of substantial benefits, including noticeably better medical outcomes for both mothers and children.
I think the earth would be much better with a target population closer to 1 billion. That way everyone could have a high and worthwhile quality of life without killing the environment.
Until we reach that goal, a global target of each adult having the birth right to produce half a child is fair.
Even if your statement were true (and this is questionable), the problem is that Japan is not made for foreigners. Like, not at all. Consider you need Japanese licenses for a great number of jobs involving care, and that such licenses require great Japanese ability in the first place, and foreigners would be out for the most part.
Licenses are setup for a purpose, yes, but they are not immutable.
Once the Japanese government reaches a point where the local labor pool is not sufficient for these tasks, they will at the very least ease the licensing requirements, or even remove them altogether.
> a point where the local labor pool is not sufficient for these tasks
In case you have not noticed, we have already reached that point in Japan, several years ago. Many zones outside of cities are completely understaffed for elderly care. And government is doing what? Nothing.
To give an example: a huge number of people from the Philippines, Malaysia, etc are recruited and trained as nurses and caregivers for the elderly - but after intense training, the majority are sent home only because they fail the language requirements.
You really can't be a nurse to an 80+ year old if you can't speak the language or read the medicine bottles, xenophobia or no xenophobia.
I don't think they are being clever enough in finding ways to get around that problem, but at the end of the day it is not that they are trying to keep foreigners out, just that the bar is very high.
This is a different issue from things like refusing to take in any refugees (something like 27 total in 2016) or offer permanent status & long-term to workers (much like the German "visitor workers"), which is driven entirely by xenophobia IMHO (and the open statements of many elderly).
This insistence that they need to open the gates strikes me as a sort of weird form of outsourced imperialism. It’s the same rhetoric it’s always been, where their primitive ways are morally repugnant and they’re in dire need of civilizing. The proposed mechanism of “civilization” is just very different.
Japan will be fine. it's already an overpopulated Archipelago so they do not need immigration. There is nothing wrong with wanting to preserve one's culture and way of life. Japan isn't a failing society by any standards, and certainly not the american one.
You do realize most immigrants to Japan are from the other Asian countries that it's been importing and exporting culture with for millennia, right? And that their "cultural distinctness" is the result of a great deal of Western influence already?
I suspect this is a proxy argument about European immigration because it always seems to be that when the issue of immigration into Japan comes up, the issue of "cultural distinctiveness" or ethnic purity is used to steer the conversation in that direction.
But Japan is under a far greater threat of becoming too "Chinese" than it will ever be of becoming too "European."
History and future plans: http://www.historyandpolicy.org/policy-papers/papers/the-car...
Is it that sense of "honor", or is prison the only source for the social, emotional and financial help that exists for them?
A solution like the one you suggest would be more practical. Save from the costs of a proper prison and provide proper care for their needs.
Sometimes I am wondering how we will age, with the loneliness creeping in to all modern societies (I don't think this is just a Europe problem), we have to find better solutions to stealing and imprisoning 70+ yo people for a soft drink and some rice.
Japan needs a root-cause-analysis asap, and act on it without burrying their head in the sand.
You don't run quick-fixes on a society at large, unfortunately. Many things are cultural and slow to change.
But I agree with you, it could be handled differently. It just seems difficult to find a good balance socially/culturaly speaking.
Do investors see something else? Are they factoring robots or something?
We now have a solid understanding that human decision making is rarely logical and only barely rational, what makes anyone actually think (rather than believe/assume) that firms really don't act in the same way?
The central bank buys up the government's outstanding debt at zero interest, removing external holdings of debt, while punishing the Yen and anyone holding Yen assets in the process. For the government it becomes a low cost approach to cancelling out debt. For the people of Japan, it becomes a stealth inflation attack on their standard of living. The choices are slim though, they already have high taxes, and the national savings rate has dropped from high to nearly zero (formerly the people of Japan funded the big debt binge with the high savings rate).
It's the next level up from what the Fed was doing with QE. The Fed - supposedly - will sell a lot of its assets back into the market. The central bank of Japan plans to just buy up its own debt and cancel it perpetually. The Bank of Japan owns something like 43% of the Japanese Government's debt at this point.
You can almost guarantee the US Government & Fed will do the same thing in the next ~15 years, as US public debt hits $30+ trillion. If the US wanted to push its debt interest costs toward zero over time, it could have the Fed start buying up all the public debt. The cost would be debasement of the USD (the dollar would fall, commodities would soar, the US standard of living would fall, real inflation would spike). If you want a functioning market for your debt, you have to pay investor's rate of desired interest. You can massage that to some degree, which the Fed does, to try to keep interest costs under control. In Japan's case, they've gone full QE, entirely dropping the pretense of a market for their debt.
The overall consequence of their debt relief policies, are causing a significant increase in poverty. I must have read five dozen articles over the last five or six years, covering that, eg:
[2015] "Last year, the Japanese government recorded relative poverty rates of 16%—defined as the share of the population living on less than half the national median income. That is the highest on record. Poverty levels have been growing at a rate of 1.3% a year since the mid-1980s."
https://www.economist.com/news/asia/21647676-poverty-worsens...
Japan has seen a persistent squeeze on their standard of living. Incomes have been stagnant for decades, savings rates have dropped toward zero as people are squeezed on cost of living, and costs have not fallen to offset that.
Economists like to pretend that Japan has been suffering under horrific deflation for decades. That's almost entirely a lie however. They've both been hit by significant Yen devaluation, which is a form of inflation, and seen relatively little actual deflation in terms of the price of goods going down. It's why Tokyo is still one of the most expensive cities on earth, despite Japan's GDP per capita not keeping pace with other wealthy nations.
To the extent you're wholly supplying your own commodities & goods domestically, you can restrain some of the devaluation effect on prices, in regards to making everything more expensive (including real-estate). Inevitably though, even in the best of cases, you end up with cost leakage that impacts your economy. In Japan's case, they're very dependent on imports, so the effect is strong.
In dollar terms, their policies make everything in Japan cheaper. It makes their imports more expensive and it makes their exports generally cheaper. As Japan began this approach, they were occasionally warned about overly aggressive currency devaluation, in terms of getting labeled for it.
If you're a person in Japan, living on the Yen, it doesn't help you at all, other than the very long-term prospect of finally getting out from under the crushing national debt burden. It helps exports some, which can bolster export companies there and the employment picture for anyone working in exports, but the gains are mostly wiped out by the drop in currency value over time. As a USD or Euro holder, I get to buy your Yen products for cheaper, in other words, so you gain zero real ground.
They desperately need to devalue the Yen however, as they currently can't afford to upkeep the vast infrastructure they put into place over a few decades of their big public works programs. So they have to get out from under their debt interest squeeze to free up budget spending for other things that need attention.
All things being equal, a QE program ought to raise real estate prices.
Fewer people = lower real estate prices.
You can get away with light QE. Once you go full QE, to the extent you do it and depending on how long you do it, you'll start to see it destroy the nation's standard of living, eventually collapsing asset prices in real terms.
Japan's overall population is already shrinking (not hard to find references) but that masks another trend - population flight to central Tokyo. [0]
So it's best to treat central Tokyo as a separate RE market from overall Japan
[0] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2017/05/08/national/popula...
Also obligatory, IANACFP, so many grains of salt.
https://support.wealthfront.com/hc/en-us/articles/210999343-...
"""The American people have been telling Congress for many years, "Spend more money on us, please," but they have been telling Congress, "Don't raise our taxes." Congress has been listening. It's been spending more money on you, but on the other hand it's been very unwilling to raise taxes. As a result, it has imposed inflation as a tax. That's one tax that you don't have to vote for but you have to pay.""" https://youtu.be/xNc-xhH8kkk?t=1428
"""Well again- with respect to money, can you print money at no cost? It's very cheap to turn out those pieces of paper, but does that get society something for nothing? Not at all, it's simply a different form of taxation. If you print money, people have more money to spend. If they spend more money on the same amount of goods, prices go up, and in effect, everybody is paying a tax through inflation. Once again, it is only a form of taxation."""
It sucks if you have liquid cash, and you are facing inflation. It's great if you are in debt.
Many Americans have a lot more debt then cash.
This should explain why governments in America and the EU are under pressure by strong interest groups to avoid inflation at all costs, even though it would help the common people who are in debt and possibly the economy as a whole.
Things are more complicated than this.
As the country acquires a history of inflation, all the debits become more expensive. Things get worse the longer and the more intense that history becomes.
Japan is spending some trust capital for forgiving their poorest people's debit. Once it is gone, they will have to pay "interest" on the lack of trust, and guess what parcel of the population pays for most of that "interest"?
Besides, most of the benefits from a high inflation don't go into that "debit pardoning" effect. They don't go into the government as a hidden tax either. At the same time, all the costs go into people that have to carry some non interest-paying money, that is, poor people and small business.
Small businesses aren't exactly sitting on piles of cash either. They own or lease assets, and are often net debtors.
The reason small businesses arent doing great at the moment is due to economies of scale, and cost of land - not the loose fiscal policy.
It is hard to see as an individual living in Japan because standard of living is not necessarily getting worse due to increase in productivities with some technological improvements. However, Japan's economy relative to the rest of the world is going down. In next 10~20 years, their standard of living will significantly worsen, but they will realize it is to late to fix their economy.
Stealth inflation indeed. In January 2018, the annual inflation rate was 1.4%, a 34-month high. This is an "attack"? (!)
Anyone who thinks Japan's standard of living is under attack, especially when compared to other developed economies, probably hasn't been to Japan.
> With that last statement it all goes bad. They assume that the real problem of fewer workers and more retirees, which is also known as the dependency ratio, can be ‘solved’ by making sure the retirees have sufficient funds to buy what they need. Let’s look at it this way. 50 years from now when there is one person left working and 300 million retired people (I exaggerate to make the point), that guy is going to pretty busy since he’ll have to grow all the food, build and maintain all the buildings, do the laundry, take care of all medical needs, produce the TV shows, etc. etc . etc. So what we need to do is make sure those 300 million retired people have the funds to pay him??? I don’t think so! This problem obviously isn’t about money. What we need to do is make sure that one guy working is smart enough and productive enough and has enough capital goods and software to be able to get all that done, or those retirees are in serious trouble , no matter how much money they might have.
> So the real problem is, if the remaining workers aren’t sufficiently productive there will be a general shortage of goods and services and more ‘money to spend’ will only drive up prices, and not somehow create more goods and services. The mainstream story deteriorates further as it continues: “Therefore, government needs to cut spending or increase taxes today, to accumulate the funds for tomorrow’s expenditures.” By now I trust you know this is ridiculous, and evidence of the deadly innocent frauds hard at work to undermine our well being and the next generation’s standard of living as well. Our government neither has or doesn’t have dollars. It spends by changing numbers up in our bank accounts, and taxes by changing numbers down in our bank accounts. And raising taxes serves to lower our spending power. That’s ok if spending is too high causing the economy to ‘overheat’ as we have too much spending power for what’s for sale in that big department store called the economy. But if that’s not the case, and, in fact, spending is falling far short of what’s needed to buy what’s offered for sale at full employment levels of output, raising taxes and taking away our spending power only makes things that much worse.
> And the story gets even worse. Any mainstream economist will agree that there pretty much isn’t anything in the way of real goods we can produce today that will be useful 50 years from now. They go on to say that the only thing we can do for our descendents that far into the future is to do our best to make sure that they have the knowledge and technology to help them meet their future demands.
> So the final irony is that in order to somehow ‘save’ public funds for the future, what we do is cut back on expenditures today, which does nothing but set our economy back and cause the growth of output and employment to decline. And, for the final ‘worse yet,’ the great irony is that the first thing they cut back on is education - the one thing the mainstream agrees should be done that actually helps our children 50 years down the road.
Warren Mosler, Seven Deadly Frauds of Economic Policy
http://www.heterodoxnews.com/htnf/htn93/Seven_Deadly_Rev12_D...
Doesn't this assume that the money that the elderly have can't be used to import things? If you can import, then the money is useful again.
There are huge reasons to expect it won't. It's not like Saudi Arabia just woke up one day and decided to trade in dollars because the dollar was strong. It was part of an agreement where the US promised military aid and supplies.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untol...
Herbivore men or grass-eater men (草食(系)男子 Sōshoku(-kei) danshi) is a term used in Japan to describe men who have no interest in getting married or finding a girlfriend. The term herbivore men was also a term that is described as young men who had lost their "manliness". The term was coined by the author Maki Fukasawa in an article published on 13 October 2006.
Surveys of single Japanese men conducted in 2010 found that 61% of men in their 20s and 70% of men in their 30s considered themselves to be herbivores. Japan's government views the phenomenon as one possible cause of the nation's declining birth rate.
According to Fukasawa, herbivore men are "not without romantic relationships, but have a non-assertive, indifferent attitude toward desires of flesh". The philosopher Masahiro Morioka defines herbivore men as "kind and gentle men who, without being bound by manliness, do not pursue romantic relationships voraciously and have no aptitude for being hurt or hurting others."
I know I have a tendency to try and view everything through the lens of WWII, but this really sounds like after the war, the US somehow neutered the entire Japanese culture a little too thoroughly.
Masahiro Morioka argues that Japanese herbivore men are a result of Japan's post-war peace. Since the end of World War II, Japan has not directly participated in any war or conflict, either within its own borders or outside of them. Prior to this time of peace, many Japanese felt that becoming a soldier was the only approach to becoming manly. This social norm has slowly disappeared during the following period of post-war peace. Due to this, Japanese men are less aggressive and this could bleed over into their romantic lives.
Even as late as the '80s, Japanese business culture was notoriously macho and aggressive. When I first read about herbivore men, it was framed largely as a reaction against '80s Japanese business culture more than anything else. I'd be more inclined to argue that herbivore men came out of the recession of the '90s; they saw how the bubble economy collapsed and said "screw this, I don't want any part of it".
I wish I could find that article again.
which is about a village where old people have to climb a mountain and left there to die once they reached certain age; this is to save limited resource to younger
a sad story, hope it won't become somehow true in future
Well, till nanny punk comes..!
What is weird, they do have "life-long learning centers" and hobby communities geared towards elders and whatnot. Maybe her pride didn't allow her to go to those and declare she needs human contact? Meanwhile prison helps her to save face in some twisted way?
In California for example, theft of less than $950 worth of goods is considered petty theft, and would normally result in a misdemeanor or infraction and a fine.